Understanding how different intensities of timber harvesting affect species richness for plants and animals in North American forests will enable natural resource managers to better control the impacts of harvesting on flora and fauna communities. Previous syntheses have only examined thinning intensity as a categorical variable, comparing low and high intensity. This new meta-analysis examines how thinning intensity affects plant and animal species richness while examining the influence of other factors.

Understanding the effect of fishing activities on marine organism species richness is important for managing fisheries. Previous reviews and meta-analyses have focused on the relationship between bottom-fishing gears and invertebrate species richness, but there is a lack of understanding around other fishing gears (e.g., long lines and gillnets) and other taxa (e.g., ray-finned fishes).

Working forests serve an important role in providing timber products. At the same time, these forests are expected to contribute to mitigating climate change. With new studies being published, the authors performed an updated meta-analysis to synthesize the effects of forest thinning and clearcutting on three carbon pools—plants and roots, organic layer, and mineral soil—as well as examine how these effects interact with thinning intensity and time since harvest.

To make good decisions, researchers and practitioners need high-quality, consistent, and accessible forest data. Pilot forest accounts are one of the first steps in tracking ecosystems services, demonstrating how accounts can be created using available data and determining what questions they can help answer.

It’s critical for North Carolina agencies to focus their limited resources where they can have the greatest impact in recovering from Hurricane Helene. This analysis helps identify the species and locations most likely to have been severely affected, allowing agencies to prioritize on-the-ground assessments and recovery efforts where they are most needed.

Ecological restoration programs increasingly aim to provide socioeconomic and environmental benefits. However, monitoring of socioeconomic outcomes of these programs lags behind monitoring of ecological outcomes. Socioeconomic methods are less established, managers have less experience, and metrics used vary, stymieing evaluation and adaptive management. Here we demonstrate that logic models and stakeholder engagement can be used to identify core socioeconomic metrics across various types of restoration, focusing on coastal restoration in the Gulf of Mexico.

Nature-based solutions (NBS) address societal challenges by managing ecosystems to provide environmental and human benefits. This report assesses 27 publicly accessible databases on NBS research and projects, highlighting their utility as well as limitations and gaps in coverage. Key recommendations include making databases downloadable, adding standardized geographic and project attributes, and improving measurement of effectiveness. Better data accessibility and consistency are essential for developing design standards and scaling up NBS implementation.

This comprehensive resource, created in collaboration with the US Department of the Interior, is a first-of-its-kind reference for implementing nature-based solutions. Nature-based solutions are actions to protect, sustainably manage or restore natural or modified ecosystems to address societal challenges—including climate change—in ways that help people and the environment. Examples cited in the Roadmap range from urban stormwater and runoff management to prescribed burns to living shorelines to restoration of various ecosystems.

The $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) in the Inflation Reduction Act—particularly the $14 billion National Clean Investment Fund and $6 billion Clean Communities Investment Accelerator—represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to leverage private capital for investments in environmental infrastructure and nature-based solutions, but the groundwork needs to be laid now. This document summarizes the relevant GGRF funds and their applicability for nature-based solutions.

Natural and working lands (NWLs) provide many benefits to people, including storing greenhouse gases (GHGs), supporting biodiversity, and generating other ecosystem services. Management of NWLs can influence their condition and function and therefore the benefits they provide. This project surveys the synthesis literature to assess how management actions on various types of NWLs affect biodiversity and GHG outcomes. This information can help to determine how to best manage these lands to contribute to both biodiversity and climate solutions in the United States.